His Majesty's Elephant (6 page)

He could see, and she could not. But she could know what he saw. The two of them, joined hand in hand, were more than either one apart.

“I'm not a witch,” she said. “I am—not—”

“You have the magic,” said Kerrec.

She wrenched away from him. “You made me! You laid your spell on me.”

“And you cast yours on me.” He did not shudder at it. He was born for it. “The moon called you as it called me.”

“No,” said Rowan.

“We have to get the Talisman away from your sister,” he said, “before she gives it to Michael Phokias.”

“No,” Rowan said again. She did not want to think about what she had done, or what he had seen, or what she had known.

There was magic in her. It ran in her blood. It pulsed under her skin.

Her mother was never a witch, no, never. Her mother was a queen. Queens died and went to heaven. Witches went to hell.

She stumbled to her feet.

The moon was gone. The water was dark. She plunged into it, as if water alone could make her clean. She scrubbed herself over and over.

Hands pulled at her. She fought them, but they were too strong. They dragged her out, raw skin and sopping shift and all, and wrapped her in something dry and vaguely warm, and shook her till the world came back again.

The world was eyes. Eyes as black as the water without the moon, and a face gone white with fear.

The witch's son was afraid of her. No, not afraid of: afraid for. She laughed at that until she choked on it. “Tell me,” she said, “that the moon's struck me mad.”

“Not the moon,” said Kerrec.

She pulled her wrappings tighter. She was cold to the bone, a cold that had nothing to do with the world's wind. “I can't do this. I can't be it.”

“One isn't given a choice,” Kerrec said.

Rowan shook her head. “I can't. You were born for it. I never was. Never—never—”

“Rowan,” he said sharply. “Theoderada!”

He was trying to call her back to herself. But there was no self for him to call. Simple Rowan did not exist, except in wishes. Princess Theoderada was not a witch, not any kind of thing that stood handlinked with a witch's son and told him what he saw in a pool of moon and magic.

“Warn my father,” she said. “Tell him to get back his Talisman. Tell him everything you know.”

He looked very odd with his mouth agape. “But—you—”

She was moving already, walking at first, but each step was faster than the last. Away from him. Away from the water and the drowned moon.

“He won't listen to me!” Kerrec cried behind her. “It has to be you, Rowan. Rowan, damn it. Rowan!”

He would go to her father. Her father would listen. A man listened to a man, even if the one who talked was still mostly a boy. They did not need Rowan.

No one needed Rowan. Not even herself.

The night was dark, with the moon gone behind its cloud. More clouds came running out of the east. It would rain by morning. Then the heat would break, and the air be thin enough to breathe again.

Rowan paused in the garden. Sweetness of flowers warred with the stench of the midden. Kerrec had not followed her.

By the time he thought to run after her, she would be gone. All gone, all fled.

Bravery was one thing, and fear for her father. Magic was too much to add to it.

The cloth she was wrapped in was her own gown. She put it on over her wet shift.

Then, because she wanted to weep, she began to laugh. All that time, she had been as near to naked as made no difference, and Kerrec had not even noticed.

Rowan began to wonder, midway through her flight, why she was so horrified. It did not do anything to stop her from running. Horses ran like that, once they had started, because it was easier to go on than to stop.

All her life people had been calling her mother a witch. All her life Rowan had been knowing things that nobody else knew, and hearing things that other people could not hear. She talked to her mother, after all, and her mother was dead.

But working magic, really working it, with someone who knew what it was, was too much for her to bear. It made the truth too clear. It proved what she had never wanted to prove.

So she ran. She ran right into the palace, to the chapel that had been her refuge before and was, for once, empty, and threw herself face down in front of the altar, struggling for breath.

The floor was hard and cold. The vigil lamp burned low. The wooden Virgin was mute.

Her mother was not there. She did not want her mother to be there, her mother the witch, who had bred magic in her daughter.

Rowan's breath came back soon enough, but her mind kept circling and circling, trying to fly out of itself. She could not stay here in Aachen, where this terrifying truth was. But where could she go?

She raised her head from her folded arms. The Virgin smiled her eternal smile.

Why, thought Rowan, of course. The one refuge that could protect her; the best refuge of all.

Gisela wanted it, but lacked the fortitude to take it. The one for whom Gisela was named, their father's sister, had gone to it long ago. She was an abbess now, somewhere in the west of Francia.

Rowan would not have to go so far. Abbess Gisela had been in Aachen till a little while ago, visiting her brother and his children; then she had gone to Cologne, to a cloister there, to rest her head from the clamor of palaces, and to pray in peace where someone else was abbess. Cologne was close to Aachen, not much more than a day's ride.

Rowan sat up.

Yes, she thought. She would go to Cologne. Aunt Gisela was wise, if not exactly kind, and she had known Rowan's mother well. She would know what to do.

Rowan went alone. She could hardly ask a servant to go with her, and her sisters would ask too many questions.

She crept into the room she shared with Bertrada. The maid was there, sound asleep. Rowan gathered what she needed, moving as silently as she could, jumping every time Bertrada stirred. But the woman never woke. Softly, clutching the bundle of her belongings, Rowan slipped out of the room.

If Galla had been in the stable it would have been hard: it was almost time for the horses to wake and start demanding breakfast. But the pony was in the pasture just outside the walls, where there was a postern gate, and she was puzzled but not dismayed to find Rowan there at this unwonted hour.

She took the bit willingly enough, and blew out as she always did for the saddle, but Rowan was used to that. Rowan walked her forward, tightened the girth its usual three fingers' worth, and swung into the saddle, tugging at the fastenings of her bundle. They held; they would do.

Galla was eager to go. She pranced, even, and snorted a little, to show that she was fresh.

Dawn was breaking as they took the road. Dark lingered under the trees that lined it, but it was the Emperor's road, broad and smooth, and the sides of it were kept clear of trees.

No one met Rowan, and no one threatened her. She might have been alone in all the world, but for the pony under her and the birds that sang, greeting the rising sun.

Galla was half Arab, and she was both fast and strong, but no horse could go on all day at a gallop, if its rider cared for it at all. Out of sight of Aachen, where the road bent a little south of east and the trees closed in in places to overhang the track, Rowan slowed the pony to a trot, and then to a walk.

Galla was still restive, tossing her head and sidling, shying at something in the trees. Rowan peered at first, wary enough herself to bolt, but she saw nothing, nor was there anything to hear. It was horse-silliness, that was all.

Rowan kicked her forward, a little harder than was strictly necessary. Galla started but did not buck. Rowan patted her neck, contrite.

Maybe, Rowan thought, she should go back. Her father had given away the Talisman that should have protected him, and he did not even know it.

“But what can I do?” she said to the air and the trees and Galla's finely turned ears. “I'm not a man, to fight with a sword, or a sorcerer, to fight with magic. I can pray, that's all. And prayer is best done on holy ground.”

“You always have excuses, don't you?”

Galla stopped short, nearly throwing Rowan over her head, staring hard at a shadow among the treetrunks. It separated itself from a horde of its fellows and became a figure Rowan knew too well.

“How did you get here?” she snapped at him. “On a devil's back?”

“You could say that,” said Kerrec mildly. A grey and wrinkled snake slithered out from behind him, with a wall of grey behind that, and a pale gleam of tusks.

Rowan's jaw had dropped. She shut her mouth with a snap, more angry than ever. “You stole my father's Elephant!”

“He was going to steal himself,” Kerrec said. “I went with him to see where he was going. He's invisible in the dark, did you know? And as quiet as a cat.”

“Witchcraft,” said Rowan.

Galla snorted as the Elephant moved out into the road, towering over them all. Rowan could feel her trying to decide if she should bolt. A firm rein and a steady leg calmed her down, at least enough to go on with.

Kerrec took no notice of the negotiations. “Excuses or no excuses, you're turning tail and running away.”

Rowan scraped together what dignity she could. Screaming at people never helped, not when they were looking at her with one eyebrow up and daring her to do something worth sneering at. “Is it any business of yours what I do or where I go?”

“Abbess Gisela left Cologne this morning,” Kerrec said. “She's going back to her abbey at Chelles. You'd have to hurry to catch her—she took the road south of here.”

“I could have you,” Rowan said very deliberately, “tried as a witch and burned in the public square.”

“Go ahead and do it,” Kerrec said. His voice was perfectly calm. “I won't even denounce you. Think of living with that for the rest of your life.”

Galla had gone still. “Move aside,” Rowan said. Her voice was thin and tight. “Let me go.”

Kerrec tilted a hand as if to indicate that he was not in her way. The Elephant was another matter. He had turned himself to bar the road, casually, as if he had nothing more on his mind than a trunkful of fresh green branches.

He was as high and solid as a wall, with an eye that rolled back at her and somehow managed to shame her utterly.

“I can't stay,” she said. It was more of a whine than she wanted it to be. “I can't help. Except to pray.”

The Elephant's eye closed as if in scorn. He broke off a great hanging branch with a crack that made Rowan jump near out of her skin, but Galla never moved. With gentleness that was terrible next to that proof of his strength, he plucked the leaves from the branch and chewed them slowly, meditatively, and with every evidence of enjoyment.

Rowan could try to break through the trees and circle around him, but he could uproot them and come straight at her. She could abandon Galla and run right under him, and then he would catch her with a swoop of his trunk. He was leaving her no way to go but back to Aachen: back to fear, and to duty that she did not want.

If she had been on the ground, she would have stamped her foot. “Who do you think you are? Let me go!”

“Maybe he thinks that he protects your father,” Kerrec said.

“But what can I do?” she cried.

“I don't know, I'm sure,” said Kerrec dryly, “but Abul Abbas seems to think you're good for something.”

“What? To peer into pools and tell you what you see?”

“That's what frightens you, isn't it?” he said. “You're more than you thought you were. You can't think of anything to do but run away from it.”

Rowan flung herself down from Galla's back. She had just enough wits left to keep a grip on the reins, or she would have launched herself into him, kicking and spitting. “Maybe I'm the danger to my father. Have you thought of that? What if they get hold of me, and use me against him?”

“Nonsense,” said Kerrec. “They've got Gisela. What do they need you for? You're a coward, that's all. Your father needs you, and what can you think of to do but run away and leave him to it?”

“
I'm
a coward?” Rowan sucked in her breath. The rest of it came out by itself, without any help from her. “Oh, you would know, wouldn't you, Kerrec of the Bretons?”

His face was quite pale and quite still, and quite terrifying. He would kill her, she thought.

She was not afraid. It was fascinating to see that there was so much to him after all. So much fire. So much rage, so pure that it was white.

It transformed him. Maybe this was what the Basques had seen of his cousin Roland at Roncesvalles, before they died at his hands.

Then he moved, and he was Kerrec again, a half-fledged boy-man in a ragged shirt, with an elephant standing behind him. “One would think,” he said coldly, “that I would know. Wouldn't I?”

Shame burned her cheeks. It started with Kerrec, but it ran through everything else, till she would have gladly died.

“There now,” he said in his soft Breton lilt. “You were afraid; you had every right to be. It's terrifying, after all, to be so strong, and never to have known. And everybody teaching you that it's an ill thing, and mocking your mother's memory. Of course you ran away.”

That brought her back to life again, and temper too. “I don't need your sympathy!”

“Then you'll get it unneeded,” said Kerrec. “If you go back now, people won't ask too many questions. We've been out exercising the Elephant, haven't we, and your pony needed a run. Is that breakfast in your saddlebag? We could eat it, you know, and be convincing.”

“I hate you,” said Rowan, but without force.

“That's better than indifference,” said Kerrec.

She would never best him in a war of words. She did not know why she had to keep trying. Stubbornness, she supposed. She had enough of that for a troop of runaway princesses.